Joining the precious few literary magazines dedicated exclusively to creative writing in translation—Tameme (www.tameme.org), based in Los Altos, California; Translation Review (www.literarytranslators.org), published by the American Literary Translators Association in Richardson, Texas; and the online journal Double Change (www.doublechange.com) among them—the New York–based biannual poetry journal Circumference (www.circumferencemag.com) debuted late last year with a 270-page issue featuring poems translated from more than 20 languages. If you're tired of seeing the same old familiar names in tables of contents, Circumference offers a fresh perspective: An integral part of the magazine's mission is to present "foreign language poets of the past who have fallen under the radar of American readers."
Fifty words about the biannual literary magazine Quick Fiction (www.quickfiction.org): From 50 Evergreen Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, editors Jennifer Cande and Adam Pieroni collect short stories of under 500 words to publish in a print run of 500 copies; they have a budget of less than $5,000 annually, and each issue—fewer than 50 pages, of course—costs $5.50.
Two prestigious literary magazines are moving forward with new leadership following the deaths of their editors in chief in 2003. Although George Plimpton and Staige D. Blackford are irreplaceable, the Paris Review (www.parisreview.com) has entered a new era, led by former managing editor Brigid Hughes; and the Virginia Quarterly Review (www.virginia.edu/vqr) is approaching its 80th year of publication, now under the guidance of editor Ted Genoways.
Diagram (thediagram.com), an electronic journal edited by Ander Monson in Grand Rapids, Michigan, marked its fourth year of publication with an all-audio issue in January. If you don't have a high-speed Internet connection or the patience that multimegabyte downloads require, you can peruse each issue's collection of schematics—a mainstay of Diagram—in silence. Recent schematics, which provide more than enough reason to click around the site, include "Some of the Muscles of the Tongue" and "Head of the Mammoth. Head of the Elephant."
From Peapack, New Jersey, comes the new biannual Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature (www.tiferetjournal.com), which seeks to publish writing of the world's many faiths, embracing their distinctions and bridging their differences. The magazine takes its name from a Hebrew word that refers to the stable center within the Tree of Life. "By articulating the connection between spirituality and literature," says editor Donna Baier Stein, "we hope to create a magazine meeting place where the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds can be explored by some of the best writers and thinkers of our time." The first issue, published in January, includes an interview with Ray Bradbury and writing by Alicia Ostriker, Stephen Dixon, and Thomas E. Kennedy.
Last August Calvin Liu started editing the Glut (www.theglut.com), a monthly electronic literary journal of prose. It's not the most refined publication on the Web: Liu describes it as having "a slight bias toward things related to food or gluttony—eating, overeating, cooking, overcooking, digesting, indigesting, and so on and so forth. Irreverence is key." Apparently he hasn't had his fill, because recently he joined Liz Tascio and Sarah Charukesnant as an editor of the slightly more elegant Bullfight: A Literary Review (www.bullfightreview.com), an electronic journal that launched in January. Bullfight is updated every three to ten days with new poetry and prose, and a print edition of the journal is scheduled for publication in late summer.
Kevin Larimer is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
